How the First Commercial User of Smalltalk-80 Helped to Create The Programming Language Used in All Apple Phones, Tablets and Computers

Like many others, Brad Cox and I read with considerable interest the August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine — the Smalltalk-80 edition. Based upon their work at ITT and Schlumberger, Tom and Brad Cox founded the first object oriented products company in 1983 – Productivity Products International (PPI). There they promoted object technology, taught hundreds of object-oriented programming classes, originated the Software-IC concept, and marketed the first standalone set of reusable classes, IC-pak 201. Renamed Stepstone after raising venture capital, they convinced Steve Jobs to use Objective-C as a basis for the NeXT Computer and later Apple’s OS X, iPod,
iPhone and iPad. Tom also arranged the initial meeting to create and plan ACM’s very successful OOPSLA Conference and has the framed napkin with many names of people involved with Smalltalk in the earliest days.

This often humorous presentation will describe this history including Tom’s experiences as the first commercial user of Smalltalk-80, how that fundamentally influenced Objective-C, and why quality